1. INTRODUCTION The field of systems biology in living organisms is emerging as a consequence of publicly-available genomic, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics datasets. These data give us the hope of understanding the molecular function of the organism, and being able to predict the consequences to the entire system of a perturbation in the environment, or a change in expression of ...

Over the last years a number of bioinformatic software programs have been developed in the area of molecular biology. The application of these bioinformatic tools to the wealth of existing transcriptomic and proteomic data can be used to predict the structure and hierarchy of signalling pathways and gene networks. In genetically tractable model organisms such as Arabidopsis thaliana, these hyph...

T-DNA insertion mutants are very valuable for reverse genetics in Arabidopsis thaliana. Several projects have generated large sequence-indexed collections of T-DNA insertion lines, of which GABI-Kat is the second largest resource worldwide. User access to the collection and its Flanking Sequence Tags (FSTs) is provided by the front end SimpleSearch (http://www.GABI-Kat.de). Several significant ...

[1] Understanding the controls over ecosystem-respired dC (dCR) is important for applications of isotope-based models of the global carbon budget as well as for understanding ecosystem-level variation in isotopic discrimination (D). Discrimination may be strongly dependent on synoptic-scale variation in environmental drivers that control canopy-scale stomatal conductance (Gc) and photosynthesis...

Plant breeding is enhanced by the availability of molecular markers for rapid screening and selection in populations. Identifi cation of polymorphic loci in cultivated tomato (Solanum lycopersicum L.) has been hampered by limited genome sampling across cultivated types. Whole transcriptome sequencing of six accessions that span cultivated market classes was performed using sequencing by synthes...

Transcript profiling methods are increasingly used to understand the biological basis of growth and development, and fruit quality in the case of fruits. Such methods provide information for thousands of genes, including those of still unknown function. Furthermore, high-throughput methodologies can be used for comprehensive transcriptome analyses, which may lead to further elucidation of fruit...

An improved way of calculating hydraulic conductance (K) in a Cochard cavitron is described. Usually K is determined by measuring how fast water levels equilibrate between two reservoirs while a stem spins in a centrifuge. A regression of log meniscus position versus time was used to calculate K and this regression method was compared to the old technique that takes the average of discrete valu...

Recent studies have documented remarkable genetic variation among Arabidopsis thaliana accessions collected from diverse habitats. Of particular interest are accessions with putatively locally adapted phenotypes – that is, accessions with attributes that are likely adaptive at their sites of origin. These genotypes may provide insight into the genetic basis of adaptive evolution as well as allo...

When two fluids with different compositions are mixed, mixing energy is released. This holds true for both liquids and gases, though in the case of gases, no technology is yet available to harvest this energy source. Mixing the CO2 in combustion gases with air represents a source of energy with a total annual worldwide capacity of 1570 TWh. To harvest the mixing energy from CO2-containing gas e...

Chloroplasts in differentiated bundle sheath (BS) and mesophyll (M) cells of maize leaves are specialized to accommodate C4 photosynthesis. This study provides a reconstruction of how metabolic pathways, protein expression and homeostasis functions, are quantitatively distributed across BS and M chloroplasts. This yielded new insights in cellular specialization. The experimental analysis was ba...